Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Margaret Talbot has written a long and detailed article
about how governments and private charities are trying to make up a gross
disparity in—word count.

By that one means that some children hear more words than
others. This is especially important in a child’s earliest years, even at times
before he can speak himself.

The more words a child hears the better his cognitive
development. Optimally, a child should hear something like 30,000,000 before
age 3.

Some researchers have underscored the fact that words heard
during a conversation are much more important than words that spew forth from a
television set. A parent who does not talk with a child but sets the child in
front of a television set is depriving him of needed verbal stimulus.

Others have added, perhaps self-evidently, that repeating
the same word over and over and over again does not add to the word count. A
parent’s conversation should be engaging and should include some complex thought.

So, children who hear more words through conversation tend
to have a cognitive advantage over those who hear fewer. Apparently, those who hear more are more often of a higher social class. Children in a lower social class often hear fewer words.

All of these observations require qualification and clear
definition. Still, it appears that word count, the number of words a child
hears at a very young age matters enormously for cognitive development.

Talbot provides us with an excellent summary of the
research.

In her words:

In the
nineteen-eighties, two child psychologists at the University of Kansas, Betty
Hart and Todd Risley, began comparing, in detail, how parents of different
social classes talked with their children. Hart and Risley had both worked in
preschool programs designed to boost the language skills of low-income kids,
but they had been dissatisfied with the results of such efforts: the
achievement gap between rich and poor had continued to widen. They decided to
look beyond the classroom and examine what went on inside the home. Hart and
Risley recruited forty-two families: thirteen upper, or “professional,” class,
ten middle class, thirteen working class, and six on welfare. Each family had a
baby who was between seven and twelve months old. During the next two and a
half years, observers visited each home for an hour every month, and taped the
encounters. They were like dinner guests who never said much but kept coming
back.

In all,
Hart and Risley reported, they analyzed “more than 1,300 hours of casual
interactions between parents and their language-learning children.” The
researchers noticed many similarities among the families: “They all disciplined
their children and taught them good manners and how to dress and toilet
themselves.” They all showed their children affection and said things like
“Don’t jump on the couch” and “Use your spoon” and “Do you have to go potty?”
But the researchers also found that the wealthier parents consistently talked
more with their kids. Among the professional families, the average number of
words that children heard in an hour was twenty-one hundred and fifty; among
the working-class families, it was twelve hundred and fifty; among the welfare
families, it was six hundred and twenty. Over time, these daily differences had
major consequences, Hart and Risley concluded: “With few exceptions, the more
parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were
growing and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores at age 3 and later.”

Talbot adds:

But
Taveras learned that Hart, who died in 2012, and Risley, who died in 2007, had
also identified important differences in kinds of talk. In the recordings of the professional
families, they found a “greater richness of nouns, modifiers, and past-tense
verbs,” and more conversations on subjects that children had initiated.
Catherine Snow, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who
studies children’s language development, told me that these findings made
sense, since quantity was often a proxy for quality. “Families that talk a lot
also talk about more different things,” Snow said. “They use more grammatical
variety in their sentences and more sophisticated vocabulary, and produce more
utterances in connected chains.” Such parents, she noted, “don’t just say,
‘That’s a teapot.’ They say, ‘Oh, look,
a teapot! Let’s have a tea party! There’s Raggedy Ann—do you think she wants to
come to our tea party? Does she like sugar in her tea?’ ” Parents who talk
a lot with their young children ask them many questions, including ones to
which they know the answer. (“Is that a ducky on your shirt?”) They reply to
those devilish “Why?” questions toddlers love with elaborate explanations.
Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist at Florida Atlantic University, has
published studies about early language development whose results are similar to
those of Hart and Risley. She recalled marvelling at “the young professor
mothers” at a university childcare center: “Everything was a topic of conversation. If they had to get
out of the building in case of a fire, they’d be so busy discussing the pros
and cons with their toddlers that I kind of wondered if they’d make it.”

We can easily understand the disparity. Parents from a
higher social class are most likely to have more education. They would have read
more, questioned more and had more conversations.

More educated parents had more to say to their children. Less educated parents had less to say.

Does it matter whether the parent is a mother or a father?

By my guess, it must. If women, as most people believe, talk
more than men, they would be most suited to engaging in conversation with
infants and toddlers. Women’s garrulousness seems to manifest an instinct
toward good maternal nurturance.

If we accept that upper class women are more likely to be
able to stay at home with their children, this must allow them to engage
in more sustained conversation with their children. If upper class women are
more likely to have household help this too must free them to speak more with
their children.

Lower class women bear more of the burden of housework and are less able to take very much time off from their jobs.

It is also worth noting that day care will mostly not be able to
make up for the deficit of an absent mother. If one woman is caring for a group
of children in day care she will not be spending very much time in
one-on-one conversation. Even quality day care cannot make up for the deficit
of an absent mother.

A highly verbal nanny, on the other
hand, can certainly provide as much exposure to words as would a stay-at-home
mother. Again, only parents from a higher social class will have the means to
hire such a nanny.

9 comments:

Wm Sears
said...

This is absurd for a number of reasons. First 30 million words over three years is about a word a second for every waking hour (infants sleep a lot). This would produce a lot of hoarse parents and a mighty confused child. No quiet time for this kid. I think that the authors of this study made a very foolish extrapolation.

There is also the clear desire to dispose of that nasty genetic component of I.Q. Given how difficult it is to measure childhood I.Q. it is easy to produce temporary increases this way that disappear as the measurement accuracy increases with age.

I agree word counts seem a limited benchmark measure and that interactive one-on-one communication has a higher cognitive value than sitting in front of a TV, or listening to a radio.

In regards to nanniess, my 20yo niece works as a gas station attendant, and in home nanny for two children under 4, with zero education towards early child education, but from what I've seen she seems good at explaining what she is doing and why to kids around her, unsure where she learned that. And for her mental health, perhaps mixing adult and child interactions helps her stay sane? I don't know how she has time to go to school too, but she's taking less than a full load of classes, trying to stay out of debt.

I remember teen babysitters in the 1970's, and they really liked to watch TV. But I was lucky, and my mom didn't work when I was under 10, and our home was filled by books, although the TV was on a lot too.

Books are one of the things I heard in an NPR interview on this subject, poor homes have almost no books, and parents reading to kids apparently helps expand vocabulary than what a parent normally will say, and being read to is an interactive activity where a child can ask questions.

My own perspective is a mother ought to stay home with her kids at least to age 4-5, but some experts say daycares are good too, especially for single children.

What's most scary to me is to see parents getting over their heads in debt and then having to work more than one full time job for both parents just to keep up. I wish more parents would ignore the status symbols, and make tough choices, even things like living with parents to pay down debt faster before having kids.

Hey Stuart, do you know of similar studies of children who come from large families? Being the 7th of 7, I was writing and reading by 4. Wonder if having extra family around may up the word count quite significantly, and also the subject matter?

I see the point Wm Sears is making and I find it persuasive. I don't know how they came up with 30,000,000 but that is the number they use.

But Leo G also has a valid point when he mentions that a child might well be surrounded with numerous people... thus that communication need not be one-to-one. I don't know of any studies that test the point, but the research seems still to be developing.

re: Wm Sears said... This is absurd for a number of reasons. First 30 million words over three years is about a word a second for every waking hour (infants sleep a lot).

If we're generous, first I see it says 4 years not 3, and you could even stretch to say an average 4yo is 4.5 years old?!--> It says Hart and Risley’s research—including their calculation that a poor four-year-old has heard thirty million fewer words from his parents than a wealthy one has."

But that's still a lot of words however you slice it, and a difference in words, not total either! Obviously it must be ALL verbalization in the presences of the child.

I'll agree the numbers are an exaggeration of researchers more interested in stark statements than accurate ones.

does anyone have the slightest idea what CD is and if you utilize it in everyday life ? Its a buzz word that is pure nonsense ... just a new set of undefinable goal posts used to cover up the failure the education "experts" are ...